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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

This happened in a country with direct democracy, instead of the political complexities in my country (US). It also took a long time to implement (another downfall of US policy making). It's also a much smaller country. But I wish we could do this, but it seems unlikely in much of the US to ever move away from car central design.

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It was the canton's decision. Direct democracy was involved [1], but at the local level, not nation-wide. People from other cantons in Switzerland had no say in this matter. The people of Zurich have decided that they want that. Zurich is not a big city, by global standards, but any city with similar size can make these decisions, if they want to pursue the same goals.

[1] Examples: in 2014 the people of Zurich decided (66% voted yes) to extend tram line 8, in 2017 that extension was opened. And just this year a the tram line 2 was extended to reach further into the suburbs of Zurich, and further work is planed for the next few years. People of Zurich also voted on these extensions, and will continue to in the coming years.

I’m curious about what their cost structure looks like. In SF building about 2.75km of a combo of bored tunnel and cut and cover tram tunnels cost $1.5 billion...

I don't know offhand what the current extension costs, but the full extension of 13.4km is projected to cost about $750M.

Construction of the tram 8 extension took place 2015-2017, total costs of 170mio. The length of new tracks was only a few hundred meters, the rest of the line is sharing tracks with existing lines. Everything above the ground. Difficult part of the construction was the fact that the new tracks were built across an existing bridge that is also used by car traffic. Nothing too difficult I suppose, just a bit of clever traffic management was needed (both during construction and afterwards).

I believe when the bridge was renovated a few years before, it was re-enforced to be able to take the load of a tram. The approval to run a tram over it came later.

Similar thing happened with the subway that was never built. The station and a few tunnels where already dug because of renovations but the people voted no on building a subway. That part of HB turned into the SZU Station.

The tram tunnels by the Tierspital where also meant for the subway from what I recall. When they converted those for the use with trams they had several issues like the tunnel being not heigh enough. You can see the tracks are very low and the electrical connection on top is almost completely compressed.

Zürich recently built a train tunnel that is 4.8 km long plus a 675 m trainstation 16m underground for ~USD 2 billion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberg_Tunnel

https://www.zvv.ch/zvv/de/ueber-uns/projekte/durchmesserlini...

Well, it's definitely harder for cities in the US. The US' whole system from the federal level down through states and cities are designed to make things good for cars and terrible for everyone else. Like, just look at the interstate highway guarantee of paying the vast majority of costs for new freeways. There was certainly no such guarantee for public transport, or sidewalks, or bike lanes.

The Swiss take their roads seriously (I get to hear about it every night : ) ).

Other points not mentioned:

Switzerland has - effectively - no domestic car industry, so there were never any special interest groups with economic clout pushing to get rid of public transportation ala the US.

Zurich is not amenable to cars, and never will be because of how it's laid out.

The highways outside of the city are also designed in a way that makes capacity expansion extremely expensive and unfeasible. The Swiss need a way to limit or stop automobile usage growth, and heavily pushing public transportation is an effective way to do this.

also worth mentioning that the US highway system was also intended to facilitate troop movement, something that Switzerland is probably disinclined to enable within or across its borders

I suspect their extensive rail system* is the logistical backbone of their defense plans.

...of course key tunnels and bridges will have mines (in the old demolition sense) in place to deny the infrastructure to an opponent. Same as they've done their road passes.

*https://www.railplus.com.au/images/maps/switzerland_map.jpg

What makes you believe Switzerland is more disinclined to enable troop movement than any other country? They are blessed not to have fought in a war since ages, but they are not less ready for it than any other country.

Swiss defense needs are quite different from US ones, so it wouldn't be surprising if the preferred infrastructure were different.

Same situation with trams in several cities in France (Nantes, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Lyon, Lille, even small bits of the periphery of Paris).

It doesn't have to happen in the entire U.S. all at once, just a city at a time.

The Swiss are also quite civilized. Used to be (last I was there) that tickets were rarely checked on buses in Geneva. It was an honor system.

That empty space would get jammed before you could say "this is not Switzerland, Dorothy".

An honor system on ticket-checking can work fine if there's high enough fines for being caught without a ticket. If there's a 1 in 10 chance they'll check your ticket, and the fine on riding without a ticket is at least ten times the cost of a ticket, the government comes out even as long as the cost of enforcing the fines isn't higher than the money saved by not having to hire as many ticket-checkers (or spend as much time waiting at the stop because of not needing to check everyone's ticket).

Well I was there for a couple of years and iirc maybe saw it twice? So definitely not 1/10. But of course no doubt some sort of cost analysis informs the Swiss norms. But it's not just the buses, but fair disclosure, I did catch the famous "Swiss Bug". (I was going to say August is a great time to visit Geneva and catch Les Fêtes de Genève but apparently it is no more.)

The fine in Zürich is "only" USD ~100 plus the ticket you where supposed to have. However, if you get caught again the price goes up. Your record doesn't get deleted for at least a year. If you get cought more than 4 times they may take you to criminal court.

If you have a valid ticket on your name but not on you, they will issue the fine but you will get it reduced to USD ~10-25 if you show your pass at a station beuro.

I don't know about exact policies on Swiss railway/local public transport networks, but I'm pretty sure by now fines and frequency of checks are calculated such that it ends up being cheaper for the transport company to only do random checking instead of check every ticket.

That is correct. There is a percentage of acceptable invalid ticket holders below which enforcment would cost more than the loss of ticket revenue.

They realized a long time ago that 100% valid tickets in impossible. Everyone can forget to buy the right ticket at some point in their life. We are humans not machines.

Where I live, the bus drivers will now only open the first door to inspect tickets, and then open all the back doors to let passengers out. I guess a lot of folks (especially kids) were not buying tickets. And the inspector doesn't have the authority to hold you or see your ID, so a lot of kids would just play dumb, ask to exit at the next stop or even argue with the inspector. I've even seen shoving and fights. Sometimes the bus driver would close all the doors and wait for the police to arrive. This of course aggravate everyone else on the bus. Other times they would have the police accompany the inspector.

It's also common to hear someone come in at the front and ask the bus driver to only go one stop without a ticket. I always thought it was a local or regional thing. Then I heard the same in a Toronto streetcar, on the other side of the world. A very surreal moment, it made me smile.

That's still the case on intracity transit throughout most of Switzerland. Intercity trains are nearly always checked though.

I think it's able to work because the fines are seen as high (90, 130, 160 CHF for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd violations and at some point they can force you to buy an annual pass) and because not paying the fines isn't really a viable option in Switzerland (they'll go into a debt register which is checked for a variety of reasons, it's kinda like the replacement for a credit report).

It's to think of countries in the EU as more like states in the US.

At the state level in the US, a lot can be accomplished. I suggest spending a few days in Seattle, their bus system is similar to what this article describes.

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